Apple Mac OS X chief Bertrand Serlet leaves company

The "father" of Mac OS X is leaving Apple, the company announced Wednesday. Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Mac software engineering, will be replaced by Craig Federighi, who worked under Serlet and managed the Mac OS team for the past two years.

Serlet is believed to be leaving the company to pursue career options in science after Apple. One of the crowning achievements of his 14 years with Apple is the development of Mac OS X. He is widely credited with being the driving force behind the creation of the platform back in the late 1990s.

"I want to focus less on products and more on science," Serlet said in a statement. "Craig has done a great job managing the Mac OS team for the past two years, Lion is a great release and the transition should be seamless."

Serlet has worked with Steve Jobs for some 22 years, beginning with NeXT and back at Apple starting in 1997. Federighi also worked with Jobs and Serlet at NeXT and Apple, but left in 1999 for sotware company Ariba. He returned to Apple in 2009.

The future of Apple is in Lion, which begins the process of melding its iOS platform with the traditional desktop operating system. Although it's just speculation, these changes could have hastened Serlet's departure from the company as Mac OS X soon could look significantly different from the platform he created over a decade ago.

To that end, Federighi was not around during much of the developmental years of OS X and may be seen as able to think outside the box when it comes to the platform. With Lion introducing iOS components, such thinking may be necessary in order to keep Mac OS X innovative.